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Hegemony (Media Studies)
A term (from the Greek for “leadership”) mostly associated with the political theorist Antonio Gramsci, who used it to describe how capitalist power maintains itself in the modern state—namely, less through repressive force than through a correlation of political coercion and civil consent. Hegemony explains how the masses can voluntarily cooperate in their own domination by a ruling class. Gramsci describes the structure of civil society in terms of trench warfare. His choice of a military metaphor is pointed, implying that political and military science are identical and that a capitalist government is a form of war. As in trench warfare, it is impossible to engage the enemy head-on because its military strength is dispersed through a wide system of trenchlike structures, such as the ...